We’re fixing press issues; thank you for your patience

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Sunday October 7, 2012 6:56 AM

During our recent run of late papers, the wit and frustrations of our readers have been
ever-present.

“Are you guys going back to being an afternoon paper?” one reader asked.

This reader used humor to make his point. I thank him for that. Others have been more direct and
more biting.

I understand their message, and I assure you that we can and will do better.

You deserve to have your paper delivered on time, for the photos to be clear, for the
advertising and editorial inserts to be complete, and for the stories, headlines and graphics to be
error-free.

That’s always our goal. And we are as frustrated as you — probably more so.

Some of you have questioned our commitment to excellence, something this company has a long
tradition of delivering. Those questions are reasonable, given the situation we have faced
recently. So I’ll do my best to explain what’s going on.

Rest assured that our commitment to excellence has not wavered. In fact, it’s stronger now than
ever. We’ve been so focused on trying to address the challenges we’ve been facing that we didn't do
enough to keep open the lines of communication with you.

It’s much like what sometimes happens when you remodel a house. You dig in with a plan based on
what you want to improve, but once you remove the drywall, you discover a problem with the plumbing
or electrical system. Once we got inside some of our systems during the process of retooling the
presses for our new format, we discovered issues that couldn’t be ignored — even though they create
short-term problems.

We see what needs to be fixed. You have only seen the hiccups that come with making such fixes.
Fortunately, not all of our readers have been affected on the days that we’ve had late papers. Some
days, the press issues have occurred near the end of the press run, so only some subscribers were
affected. Some days, the issues occurred at the beginning of the run, making us late in delivering
to virtually everyone.

Here’s what we’re doing to achieve high standards: We’ve brought in top experts to help diagnose
and repair the presses. We’ve added customer-service staff. We’ve added, and continue to add, press
operators. We launched a rigorous review of our quality-control systems in production and are
making changes.

When I was a reporter in Toledo, I wrote about how the Jeep factory would shut down — completely
— so it could be retooled for the next model year. That’s not possible with a daily newspaper. We
can’t shut down to upgrade. We need to report the news every day.

This column isn’t intended to make excuses. The goal is to help you understand what we’re doing
to make the paper better. The owners of
The Dispatch are investing millions to improve your paper.

We have delayed the much-anticipated launch of our new format while we work through these
issues. We get calls daily from readers asking about it, so we know you’re excited. So are we. But
before we set a date, we want to eliminate any issues. But it won’t debut until early 2013.

You’ve been patient — extremely patient — and we thank you. Please know that we’re working as
diligently as humanly possible to fix — for good — the issues that have affected all of us.

For those of you who want to keep up on our progress, we’ll post reports on our press runs on my
blog. You can find it at
dispatch.com/blogs.